Granted, this is not on the topic that I intend to be on, but it’s something that has been preoccupying me this year. I’ve been working on a talk about Managing Identity in Social Networks. A big part of managing identity is managing privacy. From the NYTimes article yesterday, “You’re Leaving a Digital Trail. But What About Privacy?”:

For most of human history, people have lived in small tribes where everything they did was known by everyone they knew. In some sense we’re becoming a global village. Privacy may turn out to have become an anomaly. –Thomas W. Malone, the director of the M.I.T. Center for Collective Intelligence

First, I find this idea of the “tribe” fascinating and very tangible. Growing up in a Southern Gothic family, the idea of the tribe is everpresent. Moving to Boston for fifteen years stretched the bounds of the tribe. But then, of course, I’ve moved back to a small Southern town a half-hour from much of my family, working ten+ hours a week on a fairly public reference desk in the University that makes up more than half of the town’s population.

And now I find myself creating tribes of my own. Twitter is probably the simplest online example. A constant, comforting stream of information about people I find interesting. Today I found myself worrying about a tweep who cut his eye over the weekend but still was trying to do his live podcast tonight. And considering what kind of tea a colleague brought to work that made her so happy. Or following the disappointment of another tweep who had worked all weekend on pathfinders and a workshop, only to find they didn’t match expectations. I learned about Oscar Wilde Day and enjoyed the Wildean quotes that came across my Twitter feed. I even had a tiny stab of disappointment as someone whose tweets I enjoy decided to stop following mine today (via the tribe-management tool from http://useqwitter.com). And as much as I enjoy the tribe I’ve made (along with the news streams I’ve created), I also like feeling responsible for my own contribution.

Facebook is a broader, more complex example. A meta-tribe. (Oh how I love anything meta.) It contains my work tribe, my tribe of library colleagues from across the country, a tribe of friends from the community theater, even a tribe of folks from media and PR around Mississippi who are interested in Social Media. For me, Facebook is a whole world of tribes, and all of them becoming more tightly woven, and occasionally crossing borders. And then my original tribe, the Southern Gothic Family Tribe, is on Facebook in Full Force. In the last two months, I’ve found out via Facebook about three engagements, a birth, and a family reunion–and these are first cousins, aunts and uncles, not long lost relatives. My 3-yr-old nephew’s abominable-snowman-dance graced my Facebook Wall during Christmas.

To match this tribal power, Facebook has developed complex privacy tools. So complex that I’ve had a hard time figuring out what they actually do. And I’ve been teaching classes about how to use them. The first step is to identify your tribes (FB calls them “friend lists”). Then you use these lists to allow each group to have varying levels of access to your information. Without these controls, it is as though you are suddenly born into a world complete with all the normal complex social connections and relationships, and everyone is in one big auditorium. Now try to manage your identity.

So…that’s what I’ve been thinking about.

Like the issue of competing standards, that question of values can be answered only in terms of criteria that lie outside of normal science altogether, and it is that recourse to external criteria that most obviously makes paradigm debates revolutionary. –Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions, p.110

Do you remember reading The Secret Garden? It was one of my favorite books and movies and I loved everything about it. As a fairly willful girl-child in rural Mississippi, I could easily imagine myself ripped from a luxurious life in India, and transported to the damp chill of the English countryside to ramble around in a decrepit manor house. Left to fend for myself, surely I would be triumphant, encouraging health and vigor around me and learning the mysteries of the heath. And although I loathed all forms of yardwork and whined piteously when my mother forced me into the open air, I knew that in the proper environment, the life I was meant to have, I would immediately understand how to judge the wick from the dead and coax gorgeous rose gardens back to life…and win the hearts of everyone in the process, in particular the handsome simple-in-his-wisdom country ruffian.

What I really turned into is a woman who loves a metaphor. And the wick-ness of dead-seeming things is one that I cherish. And tonight I found that a long-dark, petrified piece of my brain still had some life in it….and had indeed been waking up without my noticing it at all.

I’ve been treating this blog like a bottle tree…just a structure on which to hang my shiny, colorful bottle-shaped (let’s go with this metaphor please) triumphs. And lord knows I love a bottle tree. Love a bottle tree. Would love to have a real one in my yard. (There will be some future discussion about bottle trees and nkisi and fetish objects and Southern culture at some point in the future, but I digress.)

I started this blog in July of 2005 as a way to share my solo trek through India with my family and friends (I have been preoccupied with India my entire life…it may have started with The Secret Garden, but Rushdie contributed a great deal). After I got back from India, I did all of those things on that “Most Stressful Things To Do or Have Happen To You In Life” list. I finished grad school, quit my job, sold a house, bought a house, got a divorce, moved from Massachusetts back home to Mississippi to start a new career on the day Katrina hit. Afterwards my NOLA refugee (and yes, I know it’s not the right word) brother, sister-in-law and nine-month-old nephew moved in to my new home in time to greet the 18 wheeler who arrived with my belongings. My gas was in my brother’s name forever because he was the one around during the day to go get it hooked up.

They ended up in Savannah (10 hours instead of 5 hours away), and my brother went to SCAD and became a documentarian. I moved again after a year to a rental house with a roommate, sold the house in Mississippi, and I’ve been hiding out since. I believe I’ve been spinning some sort of cocoon, but I’d forgotten that eventually I was going to emerge.

Tonight I went to the bookstore on campus looking for The Watchmen. Apparently it’s either library-use-only or checked out at every place our Interlibrary Loan folks tried. It’s part of a new project I inadvertently started via Twitter, but it may be the first non-librarian brain-project I’ve had in years. It was hard to find. It wasn’t in the Graphic Novel section, but I knew they had it (I’d called ahead). Like all our patrons, I’m loathe to ask for help, and I had some time to kill. So I started wandering. And I wandered all the way up to the econ / science / technology / neurology / section-ish area on the second floor all the way in the back. And then I started finding books that were in my Amazon shopping cart. First, Everything is Miscellaneous, and then Here Comes Everybody. And right there, on the very same shelves was Kuhn. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. And I realized that part of my brain was waking up again.

And I owe it all to the Mississippi Library Association and Twitter and this strange Graphic Novels project.

So, that’s what this blog is going to be now. I’m going to document this part. Some of it will be about libraries. Some may be about Graphic Novels. Or revolutions. Or “that recourse to external criteria that most obviously makes paradigm debates revolutionary.” And maybe we will see what emerges from the cocoon. And if it’s nothing more than a pair of silk pjs, that will be fine. I’ve been looking for a nice set to go with the embroidered dragon bathrobe Kathi got me in Beijing.

*McCloud, Understanding Comics, p.8

We’ve got two reference positions open at the Mississippi State University Libraries. Both are for subject specialists. The first is for a Business/Social Science Reference Librarian, and the second is a new position for the library, an Education Reference Librarian. These reference librarians support two of the largest academic colleges at Mississippi State University. The positions are critical for our reference department and the library as a whole. We work as an eleven-person team (including these two!) to provide Reference Services in person, both at service points and through consultations. We also do email and CHAT reference, and we are very actively engaged as liaisons to our respective departments on campus.

The MSU Libraries are progressive and very engaged with applications of emerging technologies to public services. You can find links to our 2.0 services on our website. We also host a 2.0 Summit each summer which has brought both Michael Stephens and Sarah Houghton-Jan to our campus. Both are terrific references for our programs, AND our hospitality.

Mississippi State University is has approximately about 17,000 students, and we are located on a beautiful bike-friendly campus in a progressive Southern town. Starkville has active an active arts community, green movement, film festival, music festivals (including the Johnny Cash Flower Picking Festival!) cycling clubs, a grass roots organization dedicated to making Starkville cycling and pedestrian friendly, independant coffee houses, an (amazing!) community theater, a community market, a vibrant downtown, great places to eat, remarkable nearby state parks and spots for hiking, and a smoke-free ordinance!

We’re looking for two special people to join our team and share our vision of being where our patrons are, when they need us. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.

I’m following 51 people on Twitter. Today one of them “tweeted” that it was Shawerma Wednesday at Shaherazad, our local mediterrenean restaurant. I love Shawerma Wednesday, but I’d forgotten all about it.

When I signed up for Twitter it was an experiment. I looked for everyone at MSU and in Starkville–there weren’t many–and “followed” all of them. And then they “followed” me. I started getting updates about when exams were happening (and what people were doing to de-stress!). Then MPBOnline and the Clarion Ledger started following me. Mississippi Public Broadcasting is doing some pretty cool things, it turns out.

Then I went to ALA in Anaheim this year and found some friends to follow there. I roomed with warmaiden who was hooked in with lots of cool library-type twitterers. So now I’m following folks that are doing really interesting emerging technology library-type things. And they twitter about them. It turns out you can get a lot of information–or at least a tiny url–into the 140 character micro-blogging limit.

Now I get updates on emerging technologies, news from public radio in Mississippi, along with a peek inside the undergraduate’s mind. And I got my shawerma today for lunch for just $3.50 thanks to willbryantplz.

So now I have to figure out if it can work for our library. What kind of information would people want who are following a library’s tweets? Who would be following them? Or would it just be an RSS feed we could put on our site somewhere with updates? The Clarion Ledger and UIUC Undergrad Library both do that. But what would our patrons want to know? Here’s a list of potentially good information:

1. When anything is closing early or closed for a holiday, etc.
2. When the network is down.
3. When we have an event in the library (?).
4. When we have an interesting workshop in the library (?).
5. When we post pictures on Flickr (?).
6. When printers are down or other equipment.
7. News at the library.
8. When podcasts are released.
9. Major new resources/databases at the library.
10. New blog entries?
11. Hmmm…?

Next…who would keep up with it?

Amanda

I went ahead and made a facebook page for the event from my own page… I’ve invited all the attendees we have for the MS Library 2.0 Summit one way or another. It’s global, so you should be able to see it.

I’m still working on publicity for it–we’ve gotten such a great response, but I know there are more people out there who would love to be part of this.

More tk!

Amanda

(Oh yes–Fourth Fridays is tomorrow night…we’re reading a new play by MUW professor Brian Anderson. Actually there’s a facebook for that too! 7pm at the theater–come and support grassroots theater in Starkville!)